Wednesday Goes Like This

When A goes away suddenly I get all night owl-ish and want to stay up late every night, usually blinking wide-eyed at the computer screen while I dream and write and sketch and research. I am on a travel bender right now and keep digging up new obscure facts about Morocco and places to stay for a pittance in Finland. I usually stay awake until the first kid has a nightmare or has to go to the bathroom and stumbles down the hallway to the office squinting.

Once that kid is tucked in again I put myself to bed, resisting the urge to read a nip or two from a bedside novel in the midnight stillness. I just pat the book stack and tip A's alarm clock over on its face so the neon green numbers can't stare at me all night and drift off. The only catch with this habit is that I find it harder and harder as the week goes on to get up at my scheduled time and have my early riser solo hour in the quiet dawn.

This morning I was a positive stone, sleeping leadenly the recycling truck collection and the school bus arriving for the neighbor kids. When I pulled the curtains I saw that it was a dove grey morning with mist rolling up the hill. What light there was was muted and cloudy. The boys and I had tea at breakfast (green and mint!) and ate slowly, passing the bowl of blueberries around several times. It is a luxury to just eat. To breathe and realize that we can go as slowly as we like since there is no train to run after, trying to make sure Daddy makes his connection for his commute.

A luxury until the smalls start taking their time, eating one blueberry every 10 minutes, putting their feet on the table and giggling uncontrollably about it and asking for fourths and fifths of tea. So then breakfast was over and we were off on errands and read-alouds and Picasso lessons. The good news is, the car has nothing wrong, the brakes are great + the oil is changed, the girls in our book started a new adventure and it does look like Michael will marry their favorite auntie after all and the pressing has been all dropped off at the cleaners. Now on to kid's club, registering for chess, signing up for a mommy yoga class, and a quick early dinner before a friend drops by! Whew.

I'd say we're a go...time for a Thursday. 

A Woodcock Echo

What does it mean to receive a woodcock echo? I just got one and I'm still mulling it over.

Two years ago when we lived in a condo unit near some swampy marshland a couple of towns over I wrote a blog post about birdwatching out our back windows, inspired by my sighting of a woodcock. I hadn't seen one since my college ornithology class and was surprised and excited to catch a glimpse of the funny, plump bird shuffling through the leaves out back.

Yesterday the boys and I were on a foraging expedition in a leafy, forested sliver of property around the city block from us. Its kind of a forgotten, weedy little patch of land with a little-used trail winding through it, mostly a lot of overgrown brush under some big oak trees a place where the surrounding houses dump their garden clippings in big piles along the path. The boys and I were hoping to snoop out some wild witch hazel but came home instead with wild cherry bark, sassafras root, ribbed plantain leaves, heal-all stalks and white pine needles for various medicinal syrups and salves and recreational cups of tea. (Hooray!)

On the way into the woods scuffing through the leaves we almost stumbled on the small, fawn-bellied body of a dead woodcock. I imagine one of the neighborhood cats took him out in an evening stalking session and then was disillusioned after trying to drag the large prize home and left him there in a pile of maple leaves on the sidewalk.

Its interesting blogging one's life. There are small, odd things I notice, and sock away for writing "material." And small memories often stick in my mind more cleanly...like the last time I saw a woodcock walking along on a January evening off our back patio.

I am not a squeamish girl but dead animals make me catch my breath in my throat. I stood there calming my death-panic and my brain cycled all my related memories: my backyard sighting two years ago, my college class watching woodcock mating flights at dusk, my Papa bird hunting in the fall when I was little, the funny pictures of the round little bird in our over-sized bird book at home and John James Audobon's giant paintings of woodcocks in the big, quiet library at Yale...especially the one of a dead bird, posed so exactly like the still one at our feet.

Life echos are strange things.

The boys and I stood there quietly and then I told them everything I knew about woodcocks: how they were once thought to live part of the year on the moon, how they have eyes that can see almost 360 degrees around them, how they probe their beaks into worm holes and cleverly tweak even hidden food up to the surface for themselves, how they migrate in the cold, how shy they are, how they lay their nests on the ground and how the female raises the babies alone and all about the rocketing sky-show a male gives in the spring sky at dusk. They listened and admired the pretty shades of rust and chocolate on his feathers and his long, fine bill and the gentle tuft of his small, fluffy tail. We talked about animals dying and the circling pattern of life and Nib bent down and wished for a doctor, concerned over what it meant for this pretty bird to have left his body empty, here on the sidewalk.  I squeezed their sad little hands and we scuffed off together through the echoing leaves.

At dinner over a pot of sassafras tea the boys told A all about our encounter and all the things I'd told them about the little bird. I didn't say much, mostly listened but I was interested to see how much they'd soaked in and wondered about what it meant for this bird to echo in my life this way. 

Poetry Friday: A Moment of Peace

Happy Poetry Friday to you all! I hope the weekend carries you off into a pillowed August dream, full of sunbeams and ripe peaches, distant lawnmowers and cicada song.

Image via Wikipedia

Today I am playing with a little poetic device, one of those mind tricks to peer out over the edge of "the box" and get my brain thinking differently. I started with a list of one syllable words with the challenge being, to try to write a poem of entirely one syllable words...in fifty words or less. I can get too wordy way too fast. I need to work on being succinct, so this is me, practicing.

Image by rpongsaj via Flickr

The Bracelet

In the pink new day
While my spouse snores
I sip back stoop tea
And let my ear wind
Skeins of high bird song,
Sweet thread with no heft,
Each scale thrown in a loop
Eyes closed, I knit them snug
A braid of peace for my wrist.

Today, you can find the other Poetry Friday participants offering all kinds of great verse at Karen Edmisten's blog. Hop on over and have a little look see!

I'll be back, on Monday!

Coffee Tree Very Pretty....

Well, they want too friggin' much for the house. Blast. Oh well. We're leaving our names and numbers and letting it all go for now...there are other houses on the market and other yards to dream of landscaping. Who knows what will come of even this house though...its a great place and they've been trying to sell it for a year now with no luck so, maybe they'll call us back yet. One thing I feel for sure is that if its meant to be our house, we won't have to sweat it. Providence will guide us on this one and we'll know what to do when...things will happen.

But in the meantime! There's all kinds of lovely things to enjoy, right here in the yard of our silly condo....

And in my kitchen....the coffee tree is blooming! First time ever!

Coffee blossoms smell a lot like jasmine or orange blossoms. Super yummy and that familiar starry white. I could imagine tucking them into the upswept hair of some Columbian bride. Pretty food crops are nice. This particular tree isn't actually ours...we're only long-term babysitting. It belongs to A's brother Miq and his wife Penny who are currently overseas with military assignments and needed a home for their glossy leaved plant while they country hopped for a few years. We take care of Planty (his official name) and are happy to report that he's doing well enough that he's been repotted several times, routinely shoots out new leaves and yes, now is having his first round of blooms. I feel like a good steward.

Spring Is In Full Swing!

Well, life is as jolly as it gets around here. Dee has been given his own little dolly baby by my good friend Pintura who smuggled it out of their house and snuck it into my backpack this morning at MOPS. She has an excess of baby dolls at her house (two daughters seems to do that to you) and we needed one for a sweetly paternal little boy who has been wrapping everything and nothing in little baby washcloths and cooing them around the house in cradle hold. Just the perfect trade. Everybody wins. He's been super cute all day, carting "Baby" around with him announcing that now Baby was sleeping and now he was giving Baby milk and now Baby was "cying!" Sweet little man. He's going to make a top notch big brother.

After MOPS the boys and I cruised up to the farm for milk and eggs and a visit with the farmer's baby chicks and then we whizzed to Nutmeg's house for a little yard romp with Sprig and a cold glass of iced ginger/orange/lemon tea...MMmmmm! Hard to believe that its warm enough for ice tea already but, today was quite warm...on our way to pick up A from work the car's thermometer said 89 degrees at 5:00 in the afternoon. Awfully fun but, pretty surreal in the same breath.

And as Nutmeg quipped..."It isn't time for iced tea. This is an illusion." It will be back to spring instead of summer in a few days if the weatherman is right. True, true...and yet...who can resist the joy of flip flops and a sizzling back patio lounging session with a cold glass in their hand...seasonally appropriate or no.

We're neck deep here in magnolias, cherry blossoms, bradford pear blooms, forsythia, daffodils and flowering quince. The world has become a frothy sea of floating petals and misty  floral wonder. Every night when we're driving A home from work now I say, "Look! Look! Look at that!!" I hope it never gets old and that every spring I am stunned by the breathless beauty of it all. So far, so good.